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5 Reasons Why Article Submission Is A Poor SEO Tactic

I get the feeling that Aaron is not a big fan of using article submission for SEO and neither am I, here are 5 good reasons why article submission is a poor link building tactic and why you should publish your best articles on your own site as opposed to article sites:

1/ If you submit the article to an article site and market the article on social media sites, the links will be going to the article site and not your own.

2/ If you submit the article to an article site and it attracts links from other websites, blogs etc. they will be going to the article site and not your own.

3/ If you submit the article to an article site then the search engine traffic will go to the article site, the readers may or may not click the link to your own site.

4/ If your article is great surely you want the readers of your website to be able to read it, if you submit the article to an article site they won’t.

5/ Most article sites are not trusted by the search engines so the links back to your own site will hold little if any weight.

Publishing informative articles on your own website and marketing them on social media and press release sites etc. is a great SEO tactic and the rewards can be plentiful.

Publishing the article on your own site and article sites is a complete waste of time as article sites generally generate very little traffic and only one copy of the article will be counted by the search engines.

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Well I do think that article submission is a good help for SEO. Sure it?s not enough to ensure good results but part of a good links mix.
We have made the experience with customer?s site in Germany. It sometimes helped to come on the first page of the results.
So I wouldn?t exclude it totaly!
Laura

I do use article sites myself sometimes. I keep the best content for my clients sites and submit the boring stuff to article directories. I never use mass submission or anything though, I look for the better directories and I do 1 unique article, per article site.

Article submission is not a bad thing. It is just the way that the majority of webmasters approach it that is bad.

Article submission is not the best method for SEO. I wouldn’t submit any of my articles to loads of article directories, where they can be used again.

However, in the past I’ve created video tutorials for Photoshop and linked my tutorials to massive traffic websites, such as Good-tutorials, where I’ve had over a thousand visits per day, this does help with my traffic.

If you are going to create excellent content link it in where you are going to get loads of traffic and loads of backlinks.

While all these points are technically correct, they miss a very important point about the context of most article directory submissions. The articles in question might never get seen at all, on a new website. Article marketing is a way to use *trusted* directories (there are a few) to bring traffic (and, yes, backlinks) to a site that otherwise is not getting them.

So in many cases–especially with new or “struggling” websites–the point of “the directory page gets the traffic/readers/links/etc. and your own site,” is moot.

Well I have to agree with you on the mass submissions but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that article submission is a poor seo tactic. I’ve had decent success driving traffic to my sites with articles. Hwoever I only submit 1 unique article per directory and I only use a handful of directories. I do feel that article marketing has it’s place but it’s only one part of a bigger overall strategy.

Yes spamming the article sites by republishing the same article on loads of sites is bad but i get decent results from posting the same article to 3-4 “good” article sites with decent page rank, with the resource box pointing back to the origional article on my own site, so it can’t be a poor tactic as it works

There is a case for using ezine articles, the experience with my website which started with links generated from ezines left me with links on thousands of websites but with media and clients contacting me about the articles content.It has its place in combination with other forms of proven SEO .
Good article

David, I’m sorry, but your 5 reasons are completely biased and have failed to highlight the whole point of article syndication as an SEO technique.

It’s not about getting article directory pages indexed in search engines. It’s not about getting links to article directories. It’s not about getting traffic from article directories. Furthermore, it’s not about giving away your best content (of course this should be kept for your own site).

Article syndication is a link building technique.

For anyone that doesn’t understand how article syndication creates back-links, the process is:

Thanks for the information David. From past 3 months I have been writing articles and submitting the articles to article directories thinking that, it may build links to my website. From now I will try not to submit website to article directories.

Agree with Groupmind. Its not been about getting traffic – its very rare for articles on ezines to bring in large amounts of traffic, but a good article may be taken and used on a hundred other websites creating a lot of backlinks and being an excellent seo tactic

I believe article submissions is just another bean in the bag for SEO masters. Another tool that we can not live without and I think you need to do more research on how to optimize your articles to work for you.

1. If you submit the article to an article site and market the article on social media sites, the links will be going to the article site and not your own. – good related article that has backlink to your website will be another vote for your site. So put in some keywords in your articles and point them to your website.

2. If you submit the article to an article site and it attracts links from other websites, blogs etc. they will be going to the article site and not your own. The same comment as above.

3 If you submit the article to an article site then the search engine traffic will go to the article site, the readers may or may not click the link to your own site. Web spiders follow links from inside your article. So if you have a good keyworded link inside your article, the spider will crawl it and go to your website.

4 If your article is great surely you want the readers of your website to be able to read it, if you submit the article to an article site they won’t. Good point. But no vote for your site. It will be better if you write two versions of the article.

5 Most article sites are are not trusted by the search engines so the links back to your own site will hold little if any weight. Do a research before you submit your article to a website. Check the pagerank maybe?

I think it’s a good idea to publish articles – I use them to post in places that wouldn’t ordinarily get seen by my potential customers – for example I posted an article about my technical training courses in subject about the economy – a guy who had just been made redundant cause his company had gone bust in the recession has booked to come on my course and retrain! He would have never found me via a search engine as he wasn’t looking..

I think the idea of the social media has a much better attention rate for articles especially if your friends can relate and agree on the article or if they don’t then it sparks conversation regarding the article topic.

Article sites are all well and good but there are just too many of them and they all have very similar content, not everyone has time to read the shear volume of articles that go up on those sites.

Article sites still have their place but your right on wanting to hog the limelight for your own site, especially if you have put some effort into your articles and creating benefits for the readers

The author of this article leaves me wondering about their credibility since checking this site and a few article submissions sites; I found the page rank on Google to be as high or higher…. Hmmmmm I guess an SEO expert doesn’t like competition! 🙂

I’ve been hot and cold about article marketing and, especially, mass distribution over the last few years. Currently we use Articlemarketer. If nothing else it is valuable because it distributes to EzineArticles and a few of the other good sites. I see these articles come up in searches all the time.

In my opinion it doesn’t matter whether a “good” article is on your site or on an article site. A read is a read. And you’ll usually get a lot more of those on selected sites.

Choosing niche sites that get a lot of traffic is also a good tactic. I get the impression that not many people do this anymore (approaching webmasters and asking them if they are interested in publishing their articles).

I think it would be better to try to forge a relationship with a specific webmaster where you could submit articles on a regular basis. The content would have to be (relatively) unique, and targeted specifically to that web’s viewer base. For example, if someone was to approach me and say “I have these SEO (or traffic generating or link building or list building) articles. Would you be interested in publishing them on your site?” why would I say no?

I suppose the problem is that most writers or bloggers with good traffic may not be interested in this kind of arrangement. Not sure why…

Hi David,
I completely agree with you for not to submit article directories with your five reasons mentioned.

I disagree with Group mind who mentioned above that article submitting to article directories are useful.He is right for link building but most of links coming from bad sites or PR O web sites will be very harmful for a web site also.

Also,I should mention that sometimes to submit one article to a few article directories-not more than 2 or three article directories–may be useful to provide link building but it is very harmful to submit the same article to hundreds of article directories.This is a spam from the view of Google.
Sorry,my native language is not English…

I think article submission is one of the good ways of generating both backlinks and real traffic however submitting the same article to more than one site decreases its value. So, I think submission of unique text to different article sites is a much better option then to simply submit a single article to loads of diretories.

I think that article marketing still has its place in seo, as you said you still actually submit to a few article sites yourself. But when you say that only one copy of the article will be counted by the engines, who cares? As long as the articles are being indexed and the links are being counted, who gives a c**p about the rankings of the article? I know I sure don’t.

I submit to 945 article directories, working 12 hours a day, and it gets me tons of backlinks that have almost no value. But since I enjoy wasting my time, I continue to do it quite faithfully. Sometimes I go on Wikipedia and edit their most popular results to include plugs for my own website. I spend about 3 hours a day doing that. Then, sometimes, late at night, I sit up thinking about how tedious and boring my life as an SEO has become. I often fantasize about what it would be like to have a real job, contributing to society in some way.

Personally, I prefer to create 100000000 myspace profiles of bikini models, which I use to bait unsuspecting profile browsers into clicking on fake YouTube video JPEGS of a woman about to remove her top. It gets me 10000000 hits a day, but none of the clicks convert for some reason. I’m selling car insurance.

Well i have to say i disagree. Mainly because people submit articles for the sake of a link back from a very respected website more than attracting visitors with the article. So it’s not the traffic from the article site people are interested in, it’s the link back with the anchor text to increase serps and pr. I would say i understand what you’re saying to a certain extent but there are enough quality article websites out there where the link back would be of use and contain weight. So submitting to the right article websites is worth it, submitting a quality article to a poor ranked article site is a waste.

I was surfing and saw this discussion. To a newbie like myself it’s all very cofusing. I just built my site to resell a video tutorial I bought which I found really helpful. In fact it is what helped me to build the site Now I’m trying to figure out how to get traffic to it. From all I’ve read here it would seem as if the general concensus is that submitting to article directories may not be the best way especially for someone who has no traffic. What’s a newbie to do?

You might be right that massive article submission isn’t worth much, and i completely agree that google does count the first url for the original article and tends to exclude the rest from the search results as it’s duplicate. Thank you for the kind advice.

I use article marketing interspersed with other forms of backlink building such as forum posting and blog commenting. Did ou know that when replying to a blog post (such as this one) that the ‘name’ field is actually anchor text? So Russ (for example) don’t leave your name, use the name field as your anchor text like a few have done here in reply to the original post

I guess it all depends on the article content and where you are submitting it to. If it’s a trusted source you can highlight and link the keyword/keyphrase you are targetting and this does work in the same way as link building.

I try to restrict content on my website to less than 600 words so that it’s informative and usefull with every word. To do this i write everything i want to say, then take half of it out, leaving only the best content. It’s too hard to delete, so I bundle it into coherent articles that tend to consist mostly of reasons why the main website content is usefull. These make great articles that advertise the main site but do not infringe upon it’s content.

I am considering writing a poor quality article and submitting it to 100’s of directories, as I do the same for 0 Prank web directories just for an easy backlink – what’s the difference? Google won’t punish me for duplicate content that links to me, so long as it’s not reprinted on my own site.

Article Submission
I think that we submit our precious articles to get some links. High PR article directories are often crawled and have a credibility over the search engines like ezinearticles, so if we have a link there, it will also be seen by these bots. So making a visibility make us popular in some extent. Am I right?

Also you forgot to mention this important thing that once you have published the content on the article site, it becomes their property and they can resuse that article. So Be very cautious in submitting articles to sites.

I have submitted articles related to my subject of PAT testing, and found that the article pages have achieved a PR of 3 or 4 quite quickly. I think that means that the link is valuable. However, I’m not convinced that google values them. I have had a few bookings on PAT testing courses that have arisen directly from people reading the articles – In one case somebody had obviously typed a very obscure search query (about fuses in BS1363 plugs) into google and had come across my article about PAT testing courses. He signed up to the email newsletter and a couple of days later booked onto a course. So, yes, Article submission does work!

I have had a few articles submitted to Ezinearticles and it worked very well with the off site page optimization, unfortunately, this is no longer the case, I wonder if when some more articles are submitted (unique and on a regular basis), my site would regain the 1st page place?

I have a website that ranks on the first page of Google
internationally for a keyword with over 15 million other sites in competition, I did this using ONLY article marketing. Article marketing has come a long way, If you click my Link you will be take to a website called fts (its free to use) which allows you to post one article to 30 blogs at the click of a button, the system allows spining of articles which means it uses synonyms to change certian words in the article, so you get no duplicate content penalties, try it, it works.

If all you do is deploying articles on your website, you will not be pleased with your PR down the road, because it will stay at 0 !

Article syndication is a Link Building Campaign. Yes, you should leave the best content for your website, but you cannot afford to ignore the link development since thus far, it is the factor in PR algorithm. Having said that, article syndication should be just one of the link building campaigns a webmaster should undertake.

SUPER information! I write many articles for clients, but most never publish more than one per week to article directories, and actually use them on their own site or blog. Nice to know that we are doing things correctly.

Wow… I’ve known about article marketing for a long time but never had the time to really delve into it. There are some real conflicting opinions of whether submissions work or not. Now I’m not sure whether to put my efforts into this method or not.. (sigh).

I think article marketing is a helpful SEO link building tactic if used in combination with other SEO linkbuilding methods. Duplicate content is an issue with Google, however, Yahoo and MSN seem to accept duplicate content links without issue.

Submitting variations of the same article to different article directories helps ensure that you minimize duplicate content issues.

Backlinks from article directories themselves may not be that useful, however, if lots of other sites republish your article, it should give your site a boost in the rankings.

I am not counting on one seo technique, but trying to do many things that will help my client ranking on specific keywords. In that context, I am planning to do article submissions, but if it does not do any good, then why do it at all? I was going to use a service that will send an article out to 300 directories and spin each article. I was thinking of doing this once a month. The cost is less then $50. Is this worth it? or not?

And what constitutes duplicate content? Spinning an article enough? What percentage must be different?

Has anyone found a good article submission software that also will rewrite or spin the document each time it is sent out to a new directly?

I’ve been wanting to do article submission forever, and am finally getting ready to do it; now I’m not sure if I should bother. My main purpose for wanting to do it at this time is to generate traffic; I don’t give a hoot about ranking at this point. Can anyone tell me good ways to get lots of traffic with little time and expense? Thank you!

Thats a good write up.But its isn’t clear as to if you are promoting the article submissions or is it vice-versa.

IMO article submissions have been an effective way of SEO and most of the SEO experts have been using this technique to promote the website/s.Plus IMO most of the article submission websites offer a do-follow backlink,hence is useful from SEO point of view.

Thanks for this opinion. I’ve seen a variety of views on the topic of article marketing – some which say that submitting to many ‘decent’ sites is the best tactic. I’ve been submitting to about 6 different sites but I think after reading this advice I will stick to about 2/3 in the future.

Thanks for your good information. My company website is toward the top of Google page 1 and I have found that it takes a lot of variety of inbound links to keep it there. Although fairly new to the SEO game, I have found that single submissions to “Quality” article directories is one successful SEO practice, especially for websites that have a low PR. I suspect that the higher the PR of a website, the greater success it will achieve with publishing articles on its own url. What do you think?

Thanks for the tip.
Like a lot of people said though, I just feel article publishing is a way of getting backlinks to one’s site. I wont call it one of the top SEO to-do-list but it definitely does help.
And definitely publish it first on your own website unless its not related to it..

I’m sorry, but this article is just completely biased and uninformed. Article marketing is a fantastic way to build backlinks to your website and thus increase its rankings in the search engines. I regularly submit any article I write to about 450 directories. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty for stuff like this. Don’t believe the people who continue to misinform you about this myth. If there was a duplicate content penalty from Google, then what would happen to all those syndicated columns out there? What about every article that is written by the Associated Press and picked up by the NY Times, Washington Post, and 1000’s of other newspapers?

There also is nothing wrong with having an article submitted to article directories and having the article on your site. Some people choose to write two versions. That’s fine too.

The only thing I ever do differently is that I’ll spin the anchor text to whatever website I am promoting in order to target different keywords.

There is no need to limit yourself to 2-3 directories. If you find an article directory, submit to it. Or get a good piece of software that does the submissions for you like I have.

I have recently put together a website on bodybuilding to try and sell some bodybuilding programs, but the competition out there for any of those types of word phrases is rediculous. I’m not really thay bothered about getting a good page rank or loads of backlinks, just want to try and make some money quickly by selling these programs. Because of the compitition, I was hoping to submit a few articles to 100’s of article sites and in return hopefully just make some sales.
Can anyone give me any advise on this before I do it? I’m new to affiliate marketing. Well I have been trying for some months now, but have never made a penny, even though I do spend a lot of time and effort trying. 🙁

My website, which I started in 2004, for my domestic machine repair business, and then in about 2006 I submitted a machine trouble shooting article (only the one) to ezinearticles.com. Then I pretty well forgot about it.

It wasn’t until I ran SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool that I discovered that the article had been re-published in 13 (I knew I had some but not that many) other article directories and ezine websites but not a linkback from ezinearticles.com themselves which puzzled me a lot. But then reading your piece on ezine article submission (and the reasons against them), you mentioned about the link going to to the ezine website from Google but my link not going back to my site. BUT I am getting linkjuice from the OTHER article directories. So, to me, that proves the point.

You might be right that massive article submission isn’t worth much, and i completely agree that google does count the first url for the original article and tends to exclude the rest from the search results as it’s duplicate. Thank you for the kind advice.

I have never submited any article. About a week ago i was very close to it but changed my mind. I doupt that it would be part of seo, but the online marketing. If your site is not strong enough to provide real visitors by search engine hits, article submission may provide some linkbaiting opportunity.

I often submit my articles from my blog to ezine and articlebase, i found out that some visitors came from ezine to my blog. its not really that effective but it helps a little, i dont submit every article to every article submission site coz its a hassle and not too many visitors click on my articles.

Article submissions ARE good for seo. No idea why this person thinks they aren’t. When other blogs and sites host your article they link back to the article on the article directory and that article then gets more weight and juice, and then that article passes it back to YOUR site. Try linking different articles to one another, put google alerts on your articles and contact webmasters directly when they host your article. Offer to give them a unique article with a link back. They usually agree.

I agree that these are 4 of the better directories. Especially ezine articles and buzzle. Many of the other directories out there are very weak and often your articles don’t get indexed on them. You can help them get indexed by linking to them from ezine articles and buzzle for example. Some directories decide to nofollow links like articlebase.com – which is why I stopped using them. For some reason they expect people to carry on submitting to them. Unfortunately most people don’t know they now nofollow (I think they always nofollowed but done something crafty with the links so nofollow tools didn’t mark them as nofollowed). Once they got enough articles and awareness to make good money from advertising they then nofollowed all outgoing links! I wish everyone would take their articles down from sites like them. Not a nice way to treat your users. It’s the users that made the site in the first place. Rant over 😉

Article Submission is not so bad as its really consuming your knowledge. But its really takes some information and fresh content to deliver it to other websites and it look like what readers wants to read from your article. nice info

My experience so far with article submission is the high level of content rip off. A few months back I submitted an article to Ezine, did a search on my content and found a few sites that had just taken the body text and used it as their own. No links, just plagiarism.

I’m now becoming a fan of guest authoring as it is also a good method of controlled back links and targetted traffic if you get the right sites.

Article submissions work to an extend. It has to be kept in moderation. Here at Cyprus Paradise we provide North Cyprus Holidays and post article on north cyprus holidays on a monthly basis. We get decent amount of traffic and backlinks.

That’s quite a biased opinion with no factual evidence that article submission is actually a poor SEO tactic.

In my experience, it all depends on the quality of the article, and if you can provide more information on your website. If you write a good article with a few keyworded links back to your site, 20%-50% of the readers will click your links, and if you’re lucky, the article will be re-published with your links intact.

This article and comments started out well but the point got missed along the way.

Things I agree with :
An article once a month to about 5 good article sites buils backlinks yes, but not top quality because they get diluted.

The good thing is they come from a relevant source. relevant is the article you have submitted coincides with the topic and relevance of your site.

For example this is a pr 4 page but you will notice that I have anchor texted in the name suffolk hotels (a client Im working on)now ordinarilly this would be a good link pr4 but is the page relevant? NO because the majority of the content is to do with articles, so all you guys who have been anchor texting away, good effort but it wont really play any relevance to your site. Also there are way over 40 outbound links from the page now so all that great Link juice has been massivly diluted.

Find relevant pages to comment and submit to a few article sites, you will also notice that your article will build relevance and higher pr over the years, so it is a long term startegy also. I forgot Essex Hotels, relevant…not really !

The whole issue is a little confusing for me as I have just joined 2 of the leading mass article distribution services availible. Unique Article Wizard and My Article Network. UAW distributes to 11000 Article Directories but requires you to write 3 copies of your original Article wich is disected by paragraphs and spun making hundreds of possible different Article combinations, this is useful and will help in not breaking duplicate content penalties. My article network is simmilar but distributes only to Blogs, it also asks you to re write up to 10 different copies which can then be spun by programs using the different paragraphs you wrote manually making hundreds of combinations to your original article but this is optional as you don’t have to re write it but they do recomend it for increase in accepted published numbers. It is all new for me but it is sounding promising in creating increased numbers of backlinks. I’m not very experienced but just testing the waters to see what works.

Article submissions will really help, fresh articles will not flow pagerank but will sway ranking position, especially if the surrounding content is related industry content or the site it is hosted on is deemed as ‘authoritive’ thus will certainly be useful for SEO.

Using articles directories is a tried and tested method for building backlinks but the goalposts have moved.It is now a case of quality rather than quantity.I tend to submit 10 unique versions of an article to the top ten directories.Then I spin the articles and dripfeed them to the the “also ran” over a period of time.This method works for backlinks and traffic.

doesn’t agree much… that is one of the SEO techniques if you send your article to any article site..then you’ll have percentage the you will gain lots and unique visitors… try to think of it.. if your site is not known by the search engine, then you posted a nice article on you blog, then how are you going to gain traffic then? …so one way to gain traffic is through referral system(article submission)..

I disagree with this article. Article marketing is a good part of a larger SEO strategy. I was looking at my stats on Ezines and while only a small percentage of the click-throughs progress to my website at least I know that it’s likely to be a quality visitor who are interested in the content of your article, read the information and required a further look. That is superior to have many incidental visitors. Plus of course the backlink itself.

So calling it a “Poor” tactic is not reasonable. It just shouldn’t be the end all, be all but if used as part of a greater plan then it can only help not hurt.

My experience so far with article submission is the high level of content rip off. A few months back I submitted an article to Ezine, did a search on my content and found a few sites that had just taken the body text and used it as their own.

If you are picky, and write decent unique articles submitted to sites with good PR, then why not utilise it? Save your informative completely fresh articles for your blogs, and create unique, informative, though slightly generic overall info articles for good article sites.

I understand why some people wouldn’t use it, as some people have better contacts and better ways of building links and generating traffic, but for those that don’t, it’s a good technique to start out with.

I have been testing to write some articles and submit them to article directories and got good SEO results in the first month. But after that, some good keywords that are used to index on the first or second page in Google are not in that position anymore.

I did the same thing on directory submission, it happened the same in the past.